Novi News Letters to the Editor

Northville Rotary thanks the Northville community for its assistance in purchasing three shelter boxes for the victims of the Nepal earthquake. Last Friday night at the Noodles for Nepal dinner at Genitti’s, 115 meals were served and more than $1,000 was raised for the purchase of shelter boxes, which provide subsistence for a family of four for 30 days.

Laura Genitti was a gracious host and served a delicious meal of salad, pasta and those delicious Genitti brownies.

A shelter box was on display in front of the Marquis Theater and one Northville family was so moved that they purchased a shelter box on their own to send to Nepal.

Thanks to the Northville Record, a local Nepalese family with close relatives in the earthquake-torn town learned of the Noodles for Nepal event and attended the dinner. They spoke out on how deeply moved they were that a community like Northville – so far away from Nepal – could muster a community fundraiser for people so far away.

It is wonderful events like this that we can be proud of as a community and Northville Rotary sincerely appreciates the support it received from Genitti’s, the Northville Record and in the Northville community.

John P. Kelly

Northville Rotary

Abortion is selfish act

What is really sad and absurd is that millions of babies have been killed in the name of selfishness.

In this day and age, a woman has complete control over her body. If she does not want to become pregnant, she does not need to. Planned Parenthood receives millions of tax dollars. Their role is to render abortions to all under any circumstances. I wonder how much of this money goes to lobbyists and administration?

Right to Life receives no tax dollars. In fact, donations are not even tax-deductible. The funds from the sale of these Right to Life license plates will be used for education purposes. I’m sorry for those who feel that human life is an unimportant issue. This is also very sad and extremely absurd.

Eileen Alholinna

Howell

Insurance legislation flashback

In response to Steve Wagner, president of AAA Michigan, concerning the legislation in front of the Michigan House of Representatives, I would like to make a few points.

This legislation is all about eliminating the MCCA. What is the MCCA, you ask? Michigan is the only state that offers unlimited personal injury protection benefits. These benefits are offered through no-fault auto insurance policies. The Michigan Catastrophic Claims Association reimburses no-fault auto insurers for amounts paid in excess of $545,000 per claim. The MCCA was created by the Legislature as a means of spreading the cost of providing these unique, unlimited benefits across all Michigan auto insurers. Although created by statute, the MCCA is a private, nonprofit association. All of its dealings are with insurance companies, not the general public.

Insurance companies have been trying to get rid of the MCCA for years. Back in 1994, AAA Michigan, by the way, sponsored a ballot proposal to do basically what the Michigan Legislature is trying to do. The Michigan Auto Insurance Referendum, also known as Proposal C, was a veto referendum on the Nov. 8, 1994 ballot in Michigan, where it was defeated 61 percent to 39 percent.

The legislation before the Michigan House is going to eliminate this unlimited personal injury benefit. It is that simple. Since Michigan has elected a Republican majority in the Senate, House and governor’s office, they are going to do what the citizens of Michigan rejected 20 years go. With all due respect to the insurance company, ‘Pass the saving on to you.’ When have you ever heard that one before?

Jim Kastely

Northville

Mackinac conference useless

Another Mackinac Policy Conference has come to a conclusion and it is time to pack up the balloons, the party puffs, the togas and cheese curls. For a week, we heard talk about Detroit schools, roads, race relations, presidential aspirations or the lack thereof, the Wayne County budget struggle, the future of the automobile industry in Michigan and something called “recalibrating how our government works.”

If you surmised that not attending this yearly boondoggle was a good decision on your part, give yourself a pat on the back.

The media gushing and the pseudo exuberance of the attendees will last as long as the party marauders enter I-75 south and pass Exit 326 in Cheboygan, where one can witness the Man Killing Giant Clam in Sea Shell City!

Searching for some measurable action plans with due dates and the names of the people championing the goals would be tantamount to going on a snipe hunt where a person embarks on an impossible search. Come to think of it, that might be more fun and productive than hanging out at The Grand Hotel in the Cupola Bar, where banter evolves late into the evening with no chance of anyone solving any of Michigan’s problems.

There will be media reports of how the so-called movers and shakers met and discussed mutual problems but, as usual, fixes will not be part of the conversation. A successful conference or meeting has measurable results that are quantified and given completion time frames, along with weekly or monthly updates.

Let’s hope the Detroit Chamber, the sponsor of the event, comes up with such a plan and then publishes it for the attendees and all of us who did not attend the conference. Of course, that would be a stretch and it would be more productive and fun to just stop at Exit 326 and wrestle with the clam!

Bill Kalmar

Lake Orion

A big thanks

On behalf of The Salvation Army, I would like to share our sincerest thanks to all that participating in the 23rd annual NALC Post Office Food Drive. Each year, our mail carriers go above and beyond in promoting this food drive for this community. Since 2006, the Plymouth and Canton communities have donated more than 350,000 pounds of food to The Salvation Army food pantry — food that comes from this community goes right back into the community.

To the postal carriers, we say thank you for allowing us to be the recipients of this food drive. To the volunteers that helped collect and sort the food — we couldn’t have done it without you. A special thank you to Greg Stachura (GSA International LTD), Eric Joy and Chris Gamble (Christensen’s Plant Center) for donating the semi trucks and driving them.

The food has been sorted and is now in our food pantry. Each month we see more seniors, couples without children and single individuals, both working and retired, coming to our food pantry. Summer will soon be here and the kids will be home without access to free/reduced breakfast and lunch programs school. This post office food drive ensures that food will be available for them. We thank you.

Laurie Aren

The Salvation Army, Plymouth

Experience overrated

Gov. Chris Christie says governors make the best presidents. They’ve run a state. They have experience. Jimmy Carter had experience running a state, didn’t help much.

Political experience is overrated. I’ll take common sense, truthfulness, the innate ability to lead and inspire others and smart enough to surround yourself with advisers to shore up your weaknesses. It took a non-car guy with those traits to rescue Ford. It’ll take someone similar to rescue the country.

Selling influence to the highest bidder is endemic to the ruling class, stacking the deck in favor of the wealthy. You and I mean nothing to most of them and never will. I want someone who hasn’t been bought and paid for, willing to return power to the states and the people where it was intended. You’ll know who they are. They’re the ones most feared by the establishment of both parties, the ones they’ll try to destroy by any means necessary.

With luck, one of them will end up a choice for president. Then it’s up to us. We have to recognize the divisiveness in the country just didn’t happen. It’s been created. You need conflict to impose restraints on our freedoms. It’s soft tyranny couched as political correctness. It’ll only get worse if we keep our heads buried in the sand.

I’m tired of hearing about “hope and change,” “prosperity and progress,” “putting people first” and other nebulous campaign slogans that do nothing but blow smoke up our backsides. In the 1976 movie Network, newsman Howard Beale described a government far less threatening to its citizens than today and told his listeners to open a window and shout “I’m mad has hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Now, that’s a campaign slogan I could embrace.

Jack Belisle

South Lyon

Applause

The White House Pollinator Health Task Force, charged last June with developing a coordinated response to protect bees, birds, bats, and other pollinators, has just released its long-awaited federal strategy.

We applaud the Obama administration for undertaking this Herculean effort to protect the nation’s pollinators. The first sentence of the Executive Summary raised our hopes: “Wherever flowering plants flourish, pollinating bees, birds, butterflies, bats, and other animals are hard at work, providing vital but often unnoticed services.”

Unfortunately, the rest of the document takes a more myopic view. While there are positive aspects to the strategy — who could be against planting more wildflowers?—the plan tiptoes around the role of neonicotinoid insecticides, an insidious class of chemicals that has the potential to derail these new U.S. efforts on behalf of pollinators.

Hundreds of recent studies detail the worrisome effects of neonicotinoid pesticides, not just on honeybees but on birds, bats, butterflies, earthworms, and a wide range of terrestrial and aquatic invertebrates — effects that occur when the chemicals are applied as directed in accordance with label requirements. These chemicals are a primary driver in the bee declines of the past decade. Birds are affected, as well. As little as a single corn kernel coated with a neonicotinoid insecticide is enough to kill a songbird. Just one-tenth of a coated seed per day during the egg-laying season is enough to impair reproduction.

The federal strategy downplays this enormous body of research. In our view, what is most urgently needed is a comprehensive plan to address the neonicotinoid coatings used on agricultural seeds. These pesticides are applied to nearly all corn seeds and to many other crops as well. Many farmers have no choice but to use neonic-treated seeds, even if there is no pest to be found within 100 miles.

Although these coated seeds represent the vast majority of neonicotinoid use, their planting remains unregulated due to a “treated seed exemption” loophole. These coatings are contaminating the resulting food crops on a massive scale. Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of the pesticide coatings slough off the seeds and end up in our soils and water supplies. In an ironic twist, EPA scientists concluded last fall in their assessment of treated soybean seeds that neonicotinoids are not actually increasing agricultural yields.

In addition to direct harm to wildlife, the elevated levels of these chemicals in many waterways may already be high enough to kill the aquatic invertebrate life on which so many birds, bats, and other pollinators depend. It is in this aquatic environment that the neonicotinoids’ impacts truly dwarf those from other pesticides: They have a wide reach, contaminating not just a field but an entire watershed; they persist in the environment, often for many years; and they are extremely toxic to aquatic invertebrates. Yet the federal plan fails to address the far-reaching contamination of U.S. waterways, as documented by scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and elsewhere.

By killing off pollinators and native pest control agents like birds and butterflies, neonicotinoids are sabotaging entire ecosystems. Instead of wrestling with these problems head-on, the White House strategy suggests such fixes as long-term research on bee biology, revised pesticide application schedules to avoid directly spraying the bees when plants are in bloom, and the development of technologies to make the pesticides better adhere to the seeds.

These steps are important, but they do little for managed bees and nothing for birds, bats, and other wild pollinators—essential providers of the “vital but often unnoticed services” that support production of food for people everywhere.

Cynthia Palmer

director, Pesticides Science and Regulation

American Bird Conservancy

Who will go to bat for state road tax?

Good question but only because of the cowards in the GOP-controlled Legislature who required us to vote on this issue. This unnecessary vote and expense, went down easily just two months ago.

The GOP-controlled House snuck out of town, before Christmas to avoided voting on the Senate passed bill. Why? Because they lacked courage, are tax increased panicked and foremost, because they are cowards.

We send these clown to Lansing to make tough decisions. If they are going to throw these decisions back to us, why do we even have them at all? More importantly, why do we pay them if they are just going to avoid making decisions?

This Republican-controlled House has the audacity and arrogance to circumvent local control and push for legislation that forbids local communities from passing so called living wages ordinances.. Where communities have already done this, this legislation would forbid it.

This arrogance is simply avoidance of the number 1 problem expressed by Michigan citizens over and over. The crumbling infrastructure of our roads and bridges. This cowardly neglect by our Legislature has causes death to citizens and business forced to use unsafe roads. People and business are leaving Michigan due to the deplorable conditions of our roads allowed to deteriorate by the cowards in our Legislature.

When will this fact sink in? Legislate a permanent fix to our infra-structure now and quite avoiding this fact with frivolous legislation inaction.

Gerald Maxey

Farmington Hills

Deja vu — again

I see where the U.S. Senate passed the new Asian Free Trade bill (AFT), over the objections of our Sens. Stabenow and Peters. Unbelievably, President Obama is on board with this monstrosity. I love the man but he is 100 percent wrong on this matter.

Reading about this bill gave me a case of deja vu all over again. Former President Clinton, at the behest of business leaders and Republicans, signed off on the North America Free Trade Act. NAFTA turned out to be the worst trade bill signed in modern history. Ross Perot, at the time, said that “The great sucking sound you hear will be our manufacturing jobs leaving this country”. And that is exactly what happened when hundreds of plants closed and reopened south of the border.

Now, incredibly, this AFT bill will have the same effect. One section refers to providing money to help our workers after they lose their jobs. They know what the bill will do to our labor force and still pass it . Corporate money sure buys a lot of votes.

I once heard that a country that makes nothing — is nothing. Sadly, that’s where we are headed.

But on the bright side, when we finally go to war with China, they can make the armament our troops need at a cheap price.

James Huddleston

Canton

Opportunities missed

Recently, we saw the bipartisan passage of House Bill 2 (H.R.2) by both Houses of Congress and signed by the president. This bill was positive in several regards but negative from at least two others.

Some of the positives included fixing the doctor reimbursement problem, adding incentives based on performance, making electronic medical record a priority, putting prosthetics and orthodontics out for bid, making identity theft Medicare fraud harder, and increased payments to rural , Medicare dependent hospitals. Cost increases were covered by projected savings and Medicare Part B premium increases.

Looking forward we hear of initiatives to cut Medicare benefits to “save it” and to even further privatize Medicare through a voucher system. The fight to preserve Medicare is just warming up.

To most citizens, Medicare is one of the best government programs ever and all steps that would preserve it should be taken. There are measures initiated in the Senate that would save Medicare tens of billions of dollars per year that were not even addressed in H.R. 2.

The first bill is Senate Bill 31 (S.31) Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act of 2015. The VA is already doing it, saving billions of dollars per year. The savings per a recent Congressional Budget Office report would be $121 billion dollars over the next 10 years.

The second bill is Senate Bill 122 (S. 122) Safe and Affordable Drugs from Canada Act. It would allow importation of 90 days supplies of prescribed drugs from FDA approved sources in Canada where the same brand drugs often are less than 50 percent of US prices. This would not only help seniors but all citizens with estimated savings running as high as $240 billion over the next 10 years.

Congress should pass these bills before other major changes to Medicare are considered.

Donald Boyer

Plymouth Township

Stop outrageous increases

Medicare changes and savings — some good, some opportunities missed.

Recently, we saw the bipartisan passage of House Bill 2 (HR 2) by both houses of Congress and signed by the president. This bill did not address prescription drug costs in any significant way as proposed in Senate Bills 31 and 122. SB 31 would allow Medicare to negotiate for drug prices and save Medicare $121 billion over 10 years.

Congress should pass these bills before other major changes to Medicare are considered and insure Medicare’s solvency.

Glenn Franco

Whitmore Lake

Make cancer top state priority

Recently, I joined cancer patients, survivors and caregivers from across Michigan to urge the Legislature to make cancer a top state priority. I asked lawmakers to increase funding for comprehensive cancer control and the state’s tobacco prevention and cessation programs.

I’m grateful to Rep. Laura Cox for taking the time to meet with me. She was well-prepared for our meeting, and showed great support for and interest in these issues. I hope she will prioritize Michigan’s cancer patients and survivors throughout the year.

Michigan’s Comprehensive Cancer Control Program reduces the burden of cancer through early detection, better treatment and enhanced survivorship. But funding for the program dramatically decreased over the past decade. Increased state dollars would be used to promote cancer-control strategies supported by scientific experts and research, including the Michigan Cancer Registry.

Additionally, Michigan’s Tobacco Prevention and Cessation Program remains underfunded, despite successfully reducing youth smoking and helping smokers quit across the state. Michigan brings in more than $1 billion each year through tobacco taxes and the Master Settlement Agreement, but the state only spends $1.5 million annually on tobacco prevention efforts. Increasing funding to this crucial program could save our state millions of dollars in health care costs.

By increasing funding for cancer control and tobacco prevention, we could see fewer cancer diagnoses and deaths in our state. So let’s get moving.

Amanda Holm

Livonia

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